Description
Resistance against free trade agreements based on an expanded trade agenda, including issues related to intellectual property rights, trade in services and trade-related investment measures, has increased since the demonstrations at the WTO ministerial conference in Seattle in 1999. While the WTO Doha negotiations have broken down, the EU and USA are increasingly engaged in bilateral free trade agreements, building on this expanded trade agenda.
Free trade strategies have increasingly become a problem for the international labour movement. While trade unions in the North, especially in manufacturing, have supported free trade agreements to secure export markets for their companies, trade unions in the Global South oppose these agreements, since they often imply deindustrialisation.
The purpose of this volume is to understand better these dynamics underlying free trade policy-making. Academics, trade union researchers and social movement activists analyse these issues in detail in order to explore possibilities for transnational labour solidarity.
This book was published as a special issue of Globalizations.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction I. Conceptual reflections 2. The implosion of global capitalism and the challenge for the radical left 3. ‘Imperialist rent’ in practice and theory 4. Uneven and combined development and unequal exchange: the second wind of neoliberal ‘free trade’ II. Empirical investigations 5. European trade unions and free trade: between international solidarity and perceived self-interest 6. Canadian, Québécois and European unions and the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement negotiations 7. The ASEAN-China FTA and its implications for the global economy 8. COSATU and South Africa’s free trade policy 9. The Free Trade Area of the Americas in the Long Crisis of Brazilian Labour: lessons for building North-South responses to the current crisis 10. Free trade and the new labour internationalism 11. Mapping the resistance against bilateral free trade and investment agreements III. Outlook 12. Unions and Trade: what kind of solidarity? 13. Global Crises: the need to go beyond transnational solidarity in the struggle against the expansion of free trade agreements 14. Conclusions
